“We missed you, too,” Gentry said, pushing up her glasses as she smiled.
Both her kids had Harris’s dark hair and her eyes. Gentry had reached that gangly preteen stage while Xander was still short and anxious to be taller than his sister. He hung on for an extra second before opening the passenger side door and pulling out her backpack.
“I’ll take this upstairs,” he called.
“Thank you and don’t run.”
He flashed her a grin before bolting into the house. Seconds later she heard his footsteps pounding on the stairs.
“This is him not running?” she asked lightly.
Gentry shook her head. “You know how he is, Mom. He has a lot of energy.”
“He does.”
She picked up her purse, then put her arm around her daughter. “How are you doing?”
“Good. I’ve been working on my collage. I think I have allthe paper I need, but I’m still playing around with the design. It’s hard to get the feathers right.”
“It is.”
Gentry had an art project for school. Everyone was to create a mixed media collage and her daughter had chosen to make a picture of Ramon. The subtle shading of his gray body was proving to be a challenge.
“Want to work on it after dinner?” she asked.
Gentry nodded.
They went inside. Jax tried not to tense when she saw Harris. They hadn’t spoken since his demand that they change the parenting plan and she wasn’t sure if he was going to be sulking or not. Harris tended not to be happy when things didn’t go his way. But when she walked into the kitchen, he looked up and smiled at her.
“Right on time,” he said easily. “I have dinner in the pressure cooker.”
“It’s beef stew,” Gentry said. “I helped Dad cut up everything. Xander peeled the potatoes.”
“Look at you,” Jax said, still eyeing her ex. “Soon you’ll want to take over preparing meals for the family.”
“That’s not going to happen,” her twelve-year-old said with a grin. “I don’t like it that much. But it’s fun to pick out recipes with Dad and plan them for our Sunday dinners.”
An unexpected consequence of the divorce, she thought. Harris learning to cook. The first couple of weeks he’d had the kids, he’d done takeout every night, but that had gotten old and expensive really fast. Then he’d tried to guilt Jax into batch cooking for him and the kids. When she’d refused, he’d been forced to figure it out for himself. Between the new air fryer and pressure cooker, he’d managed to come up with enough meals to get him through his weeks with the kids.
Harris pointed to the large family calendar on the wall. “I updated everything with them yesterday,” he said. “The big game with Los Lobos High is Thursday and I’d like them to come.”
“Of course.” The rivalry between the two schools went back for generations. “We’ll all be there. You wrote down the time?”
He nodded. “Get there early if you want good seats.”
Xander ran back into the kitchen and threw himself at Jax. “I want to sit down in front,” he said, only to correct himself. “No, up high in the bleachers so we can see everything.”
“It’s whatever you two want,” she said easily, thinking that another happy coincidence of her divorce was that she didn’t feel the pressures of being the “coach’s wife.” While technically she hadn’t had any responsibilities, the reality was different. She’d been expected to attend more games than she would have liked, and had made sure she was available to talk to any of the students who might have a problem they couldn’t bring up to their parents. She’d had to host beginning- and end-of-season BBQs in their backyard. Now all that still happened, but on the “Harris” weeks, and she wasn’t involved at all.
He showed her the food he bought to cover breakfast and school lunches for the week. Next Saturday she would do grocery shopping so Harris was ready for his week. Right at five thirty, they sat down to dinner.
The kids talked over each other, bringing her up-to-date on their previous week. Xander had to excuse himself to go get his spelling test where he’d gotten an A minus.
“You’re such a brainiac,” she said fondly. “You’re doing great in math, too.”
“I want an academicanda baseball scholarship when I go to college,” he said.
“You’re going to make it happen.”
